(May 6, 2019 at 6:33 pm)Jehanne Wrote: A.C. was not a scientist, but he was a futurist. IMO, any civilization a billion years ahead of us would still have computers that were at most several times faster than we what got. Moore's Law is dead, and quantum computing is a pipe dream, kind of like renewable nuclear fusion.
Clarke was both a Mathematician and a Physicist.
He was the first to come up with the idea of syncronised, geostationalry communications satelites. So he was practical as well as 'Futuristic'.
Again, my point is trying to show that if some one/thing presented strange and esoteric behaviour we would first have to rule out a LOT of things before we start throwing terms such as 'Magic' and 'Miracle' about.
Moore's law is not quite as dead as you postulate. We've just gotten cleverer at working around the constraints.
As for fusion? The reasons for its time of development are many and varied... the main of which is that it's obviously quite hard to tame a stellar function. Our physicists can make a freakin' shape charge out of a fiussion explosion. Taming fusion is another puzzle they are beavering away at solving.
Just because man was never ment to fly didn't prevent people from launching themselves off the ground untill a couple of fellows figured out how to miss comming back down.
Civilizations a billion developmental years ahead of us might use mechanical, nano sized gear driven Babbage analog computing systems instead of electronic digital computers for all we know of how things develope technologically.
More years still doesn't mean folks will come across the same ideas as one another, regardless of both aving the same undelying physicss beneath them.
Cheers.
Not at work.
